Patti Anklam, long time KMWorld conference speaker and participant, posted an interesting piece about three types of KM — big, little & personal.  She describes big KM as enterprise-wide which includes:

• Content management (including KM portals, search strategies)
• Consulting (to business units) on knowledge container and sharing methodologies, embedding knowledge capture and sharing into business processes
• Providing thought leadership on the application of KM to IT and the implementation of the KM infrastructure
• Innovation and ideation services
• Social software advocacy
• Key community (centers of excellence and expertise) support to build and transfer vital corporate knowledge
• Project materials
• Stewarding a collaboration strategy in support of communities of practice
• Providing learning and knowledge transfer opportunities through best practices, stimulating conversations that matter, and experiential learning practices for teams

I find that KM means different things to different people and I like Patti’s definition:  a “collection of disciplines, methods and tools embedded in an information infrastructure that supports creation and sharing of knowledge assets to achieve business goals.”  What do you think?

Patti mentions several KMWorld 2009 speakers in her post — Stan Garfield and Dave Snowden and says, “The continual flow of new methods, ideas, and perspectives is what keeps me involved in the KM community.”  The exchange of ideas, description of methods and practices, and perspectives will be many at the KMWorld 2009 Conference in San Jose, November 17-19.  Join us!

Here we go.  KMWorld 2008 is kicking off tomorrow morning.

There’s a great roster of sessions and speakers this year, coming at a time of massive and rapid changes coming thick and fast to the knowledge -based workplace of this first decade  of the 21st century.  Web 2.0. Enterprise 2.0, SaaS, Cloud Computing, advances in algorithm-based contextual enterprise search, a growing understanding of social computing and the ways people share and exchange information to build effective and flexible responses on a dynamic basis to demanding customers and markets.

Last year at KMWorld 2007 several bloggers kicked out a few posts that helped highlight and spread awareness of some of the thought leaders on offer at this major conference.  This year we’re kicking it up a notch … we’ve asked a number of key contributors in the KM domain to offer up one or more blog posts, either on sessions they are attending or offering, or that offer a glimpse of an interesting session they’ve attended.

We’ve asked leading lights Dave Snowden and Dave Pollard to offer up some of their thoughts.  We’ve asked Jenny Ambrozek and Patti Anklam to weigh in.  Stuart Henshall will, we hope, bring his considerable blogging skills to bear in a couple of posts.  Learning maven and guru Jay Cross of the Internettime blog has agreed to weigh in, conference organizer Jane Dysart (also an active blogger in her own right) will pitch in, and I’m going to do my best to provide you with an over view of some of the interesting sessions I attend.

We also have a Twiiter account that these bloggers will use to “tweet” issues of interest and once Stuart helps us make sure we know how to use it correctly, we’ll have the Twitter channel Phweet-enabled so that people can connect and talk easily.

The conference opens up first thing tomorrow morning with a keynote speech by John Kao, the author of Innovation Nation and a serial innovator who is widely acknowledged as one of the world’s leading authority on the future of business. He will explore the intersection of innovation and transformation to help define the landscape for enterprise—and knowledge workers—in the years ahead.  John has a proven record of identifying circumstances long before they coalesce into trends and is a highly qualified voice to help us set a course for the next decade.  

You’re welcome to check on, give us feedback and ask questions – we will do our best to respond quickly in a useful way.